Ring Indoor Cam Review and Pricing

Getting Started

Ring Indoor Cam Packaging

Open box, lift camera out, plug in. There’s not much more to it than that when you’re dealing with Ring Indoor. When it comes to the industry’s best DIY security equipment, it’s always comforting to know that it’s going to be an easy installation.

We powered it on, scanned the camera’s QR code in the app, and followed the prompts, which included waiting a few minutes for the firmware to update, then syncing the camera to our smartphones. The whole thing took all of 10 minutes, most of which was spent deciding where we would place the camera.

Ring App Dashboard – Night Vision

Now, it was time to see how this thing would perform in real-life situations.

Since we planned to start off with the camera on a surface and not mounted to a wall, we didn’t need the mounting plate and hardware included in the box. But we did store it in case we ever do!

Ring Indoor Cam on Bookshelf

From there, we tilted the camera a bit forward from its attached stand, and set it down on an upper level of our bookshelf.

Our Experience With Ring Indoor

After setting everything up and updating the Ring app, we could truly appreciate what this compact camera brings to the table. It has the same reliability we’ve come to expect from the Ring ecosystem. However, our testing revealed both strengths and areas for improvement.

Now, let’s cover what we loved about Ring Indoor – and what we didn’t.

What We Loved

With Ring, we can always count on precise, detailed motion alerts. Further, under motion settings, we could adjust the type of motion we wanted to be alerted to, as well as what time of day to receive the alerts. And, if we wanted the camera’s motion sensor to avoid certain areas, we could enable that, too, by adjusting “motion zones.”

Ring Motion Notifications

Creating motion zones has always been straightforward with Ring, though they’re not alone in this. Reolink offers similarly intuitive zone customization, albeit at a slightly higher price point these days. We covered the full Reolink experience here, if you’re interested.

Setting motion zones on Ring Indoor

Going further, we set up motion snooze to ensure we wouldn’t be awakened in the middle of the night by notifications.

Then, we honed in on a few “areas of interest” in our home that we wanted more eyes on. One of them, inevitably, is the path our puppy takes when he gets up in the middle of the night. Was he eating? Was he trying to escape? Was he having late-night heavy metal parties with his no-good puppy friends?

In our initial tests, we placed the camera in our living room so it would record areas we knew our little bruiser would visit during those hours.

Then, we let our Indoor Cam handle the rest.

He’s not supposed to be up there.

In the morning – after giving our puppy a firm talking-to about not climbing on the furniture – we moved the camera. This time, we zeroed in on a part of the house where our children regularly congregate – the office, in this case, to make sure our middle schoolers were getting their homework done.

Ring Indoor Cam Video Quality

As you can see, the freedom of movement this camera and motion flexibility provides really won us over. It made the whole setup experience easy and fast, and we think you’ll really like using it to keep tabs on multiple areas in our home – or even add on cameras for more 24/7 coverage if you choose.

Ring Indoor Cam

What We Didn’t Love

Of course, no camera is perfect. As we tested different scenarios and functions in the camera, the communication between the camera and its cloud service was not always airtight. We encountered occasional (but thankfully short) delays in the two-way audio that made communicating difficult, but to be fair, it’s not the first time we’ve seen this glitch in a security camera. Most of the smart home cameras we’ve tested experience some form of audio lag, particularly when network conditions aren’t optimal. Most of the time, we’ve attributed it to our home Wi-Fi speed in the past, and this could very well be the culprit now. Either way, the delay was negligible.

We also wished the cord was longer. Maybe it’s because we’re not the best planners; we kept having to climb up and climb down from tall places to find the next home for our camera, and we came a little too close to injury a few times. (Yes, we know we can use an extension cord. We did that when we chose the camera’s permanent location, don’t worry!)

For small devices like this, flexibility is key. And a camera with a 6.5-foot cord doesn’t fully get us there. Perhaps an 8-foot cord would be a sensible upgrade in future generations. Even the Wyze Cam v3, a budget-friendly camera with basic functionality, comes with a longer power cord. To learn more, check out our hands-on Wyze camera review. But we’re not picky; extension cords work, too.

Our final gripe, and it’s not a new one, is with night vision. This is where the limitations of security camera footage come into view. The picture was grainy, and it was hard to distinguish lighter objects from darker ones. Could we still see the dog’s eyes glowing (creepy much?) from clear across the room via our indoor cam in the middle of the night? Yes, but from our experience, we think most security cameras could handle that task these days.

Ring Indoor Cam Night Vision

In all seriousness, we do wish the overall picture was a little crisper. That could be accomplished with HDR, and Ring doesn’t offer that option (yet). Also, though, it’s not generally as important to have good night vision in an indoor camera than an outdoor one. If you do happen to prefer color night vision, a recent Arlo camera review of Arlo’s suite of cameras gave us some pretty stunning results. Just something to consider.

Pricing

In cementing their reputation for hassle-free à la carte home security, Ring has kept prices low to make it easy for anyone to add security cameras to their homes. So low-cost options like Ring Indoor are great, but you also have options for more expensive models that offer more advanced features.

Here’s a detailed cost breakdown of Ring’s cameras:

So before you think that this $50 Ring Indoor camera couldn’t possibly compete with its more expensive siblings, the Ring Floodlight and Ring Spotlight cameras … think again. For high-quality 1080p video quality and excellent customization, the Indoor Cam gets the job done.

Ring Home Plans

We’ve seen subscription plans become standard in the home security industry over the years. ADT Home Security, for instance, and other full-service brands typically require signing a service agreement for monitoring. The advantage over those traditional brands is that with Ring Protect, you can sign up for a subscription and cancel at any time.

With Ring’s Home Basic plan, we were able to view our recorded clips, download them, and share them on social media directly from the app. We think these are all great features to have — and at only $4.99 per month per device, it’s quite reasonable.

Since this was our fifth Ring camera – we’ve built quite the collection – we decided it made sense to upgrade to Home Standard, for $9.99 per month. This way, we’d ensure that each camera would perform at the same level and that they’d communicate with one another seamlessly.

Ring Protect Plus Plan

The Bottom Line on Ring Indoor

Ring, in releasing its indoor model, has made using home security cameras possible for almost anyone – penny-pinchers, tech-averse retirees, working parents (like us), and young people on the move. What we love about this camera, among other things, is that it can fit into so many small spaces and can be moved easily around our home if we choose.

And beyond that, we just love how easy it is to customize all of Ring’s features to our needs.

And since we feel that it’s reasonably priced at $49.99, we could easily add one or two more around our home if we need to. With its simple plug-and-play setup, the Ring Indoor Camera perfectly complements our home security setup. It adds more protection from intruders — and from misbehaving puppies.

Ring Indoor Camera

Ring Indoor Cam FAQs